u/DandyLionsInSiberia

This popped up recently on BBC iPlayer, the BBC quietly adding a curated library drawn from its 80s/90s Screen Two feature-length drama strand, which tackled everything from social unrest and political conflict to class, race, sexuality and the awkward bits of British life that television now often seems terrified of touching.

One of the more fascinating additions is Stonewall. Having recently endured the glossy, historically dubious Hollywood remake that somehow managed to airbrush away many of the very people who dug their heels in and those who stood their ground alongside them. The 1995 version feels like a necessary corrective.

Guillermo Díaz and Fred Weller do a terrific job as the two leads, grounding the film in something recognisably human rather than turning history into a parade of inspirational clichés. The film doesn't pretend the world around Stonewall was simple. It acknowledges the uncomfortable reality that organised crime often controlled the bars, that police corruption and routine brutality were simply part of the furniture, and that survival itself demanded compromises. Yet what emerges isn't victimhood but an exhilarating, bloody-minded refusal to disappear quietly or accept inequality as the natural order of things.

It's a film interested in contradictions rather than slogans. People are messy, frightened, funny, flawed and brave, sometimes all within the same scene. That complexity is what gives the eventual eruption its weight.

Yes, it's depicting events in late 1960s America rather than Britain, but for anyone with BBC iPlayer access it's an interesting watch, both as a piece of television drama and as a portrayal of a pivotal moment in modern LGBT history. The attached clip neatly captures the relationship between Matty Dean and La Miranda, two very different archetypes who, in their own ways, inspire each other to stop simply surviving and start standing up for themselves and those around them.

This popped up recently on the soundtrack of the BBC drama Red Rose. Such a banger.

For Xennials, and anyone who likes weighty ideas hidden inside perfect pop songs, Sleeping Satellite is a gem.

For years, plenty of people thought it was a wistful breakup song. It wasn't. Tasmin Archer was having a pop at humanity for bottling the Space Age. "Did we fly to the moon too soon?" isn't nostalgia. It's a rebuke. The race was won, the flag planted, the photos taken. Then everyone seemed to decide, "That'll do."

The brilliance is that it sounds intimate while mourning something much bigger. The death of ambition. A generation that grew up expecting moon bases and Mars got doomscrolling and meal deals instead.

A chart hit about squandered human potential, wrapped in one of the most beautiful melodies of the '90s.

It's almost kinda hand -gnawingly clichéd to say it... but they really don't make them like that anymore.. we really were very spoiled.

Bit of a wildcard question for the aficionados...

Connecting NYC noise to mid-90s Britain is undeniably a massive stretch, but Lydia Lunch’s influence on Britpop-adjacent figures like Richey Edwards makes you wonder how deeply no wave crept into Britpop's art-school tier.

Everyone knows the prevailing consensus. Britpop was a sunny, optimistic celebration of nostalgic 1960s melodies, while no wave was pure, abrasive nihilism. They are completely mismatched. Yet.. look past that conventional pop-rock veneer and you can spot weird avant-garde sensibilities subtly filtering into bands like Blur and Elastica, who cited the American scene alongside Wire and The Fall.

It pops up in Graham Coxon's atonal guitar disruptions on "Chemical World" and Elastica’s sharp rhythm arrangements that mirror DNA or Bush Tetras.

There is an obvious gulf between these two worlds, but it is fascinating for the geeks to see how those cynical, abrasive textures managed to subtly creep into such a bright mainstream scene.

Even if it was just a stylised nod from a few art-school insiders playing with their record collections, it is fascinating how that jagged American friction still found a way to permeate underneath the pristine and very mainstream output.

I heard the Sinatra original recently and was reminded of the Blossom Dearie cover - which feels less like an interpretation than a gently raised eyebrow at the whole affair. Sinatra swings at it with metropolitan confidence, all polished charm and masculine certainty; Dearie, by contrast, turns the song into something lighter, slyer, almost conspiratorial, as though dancing were faintly ridiculous but perhaps unavoidable. Where his version strides into the room, hers hovers at the doorway with impeccable timing and a private joke.

Worth noting, too, that I Won’t Dance suits Dearie almost suspiciously well: few singers have ever sounded so perfectly at home with flirtation conducted at arm’s length...

Just learned of Anthony Head’s sad passing.

And oh, what rotten manners of the universe.

Anthony Head had that endangered British quality, the ability to radiate intelligence without making everyone else feel like a dunce. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer he gave us Rupert Giles, librarian, warrior, surrogate father, wearer of tweed with unexpected allure, the man who made apocalypse management seem oddly comforting.

Off screen, by all accounts, he was a quiet north star for younger actors too, guiding, steady, never showy. James Marsters once spoke of Head’s understated technique as a genuine education, helping him temper a more theatrical style of acting for television and learn the peculiar art of doing less while somehow meaning more.

Some actors leave performances. The lucky few leave atmosphere. Anthony Head leaves a world feeling slightly less clever, less kind, and infinitely less well supervised.

Rip. Anthony.

An old Jonathan Donahue interview floated onto my feed the other day, and it got me thinking about the dizzying excitement of the mid-nineties. You can hardly blame everyone for getting swept up in the fun, but did we accidentally sideline some of the more delicate, ethereal dreamers in the process?

Donahue poured his heart into the lush fantasias of See You on the Other Side, only to watch it drift away unnoticed. He sadly described the isolation as a vacuum where his candle was simply blown out, leaving him feeling like a ghost while the rest of the country was busy celebrating with Oasis. It must have been heartbreaking when the industry magic vanished overnight simply because the record wasn't a standard lad-rock anthem.

It makes you wonder whether the joyful Britpop crowd ever really thought to look beyond the scene, or if our celebrated diversity of taste was just a lovely subcultural myth.

The music press was understandably infatuated with the energy of the Camden scene, but that meant wonderfully textured sonic experiments were left out in the cold. Music fans genuinely loved independent music, but the glittering, flag-waving narrative of Cool Britannia was incredibly hard to resist.

Were we truly averse to a wider musical landscape, or were we all just too intoxicated by a sweet, unifying nostalgia to notice the quiet beauty being gently shuffled out of view right under our noses?

>“Sculpture of Man” is the Manic Street Preachers at their most feral: a B-side tossed behind Faster like a lit firework into a skip, all sparks, bile and exquisite bad manners. Two minutes of cultural nausea dressed as punk velocity. Where lesser bands write songs, the Manics stage indictments.

>The title alone drips contempt. “Man” is no breathing soul here, merely an exhibit, posed, damaged, chiselled by war, media and the pornography of modern feeling. Richey Edwards’ lyrics do not narrate so much as slash. Images arrive like newspaper clippings in a blender: conflict repackaged as entertainment, catastrophe flattened into spectacle, history sold back to the living as sentimental décor.

>Its deepest target is cultural numbness. War becomes content. Tragedy becomes merchandise. Even grief arrives shrink-wrapped, ( such as the later phenomenon evidenced after Princess Diana's death) transformed from woman into consumable iconography. The song sneers at a society so saturated by images it can no longer distinguish suffering from scenery.

>Musically, it barely pauses to breathe. James Dean Bradfield spits the lyrics like he is outrunning collapse, the band sounding less like rock musicians than a siren with guitars attached. Melody is sacrificed to urgency because panic is the point.

>What makes Sculpture of Man linger, though, is the wound beneath the sneer. Edwards’ disgust is too articulate to be nihilism. This is disappointed idealism in steel-capped boots: rage at a culture that has learned to aestheticise everything and feel nothing.

>Not a B-side, then. A beautifully vicious little nervous breakdown.